skill-creator: Anthropic's Skill for Building Skills
skill-creator is Anthropic's official skill for writing, editing and testing Claude skills, with evals and description tuning. Install, usage and tips.
By Claudekit Team Published 1 min read
- Category
- Development
- Source
- github.com
- Repository
- github.com
- GitHub stars
- 183,344
- License
- Apache-2.0
Install
/plugin install skill-creator@claude-plugins-officialskill-creator is Anthropic’s skill for making skills. It helps you create a new skill from scratch, improve an existing one, run evals to test it, benchmark performance across runs, and optimize a skill’s description so Claude triggers it at the right moments.
What it does
- Captures intent by interviewing you about what the skill should do and when.
- Writes the
SKILL.mdwith frontmatter and concise instructions, plus supporting files where useful. - Tests the skill with eval prompts, including variance analysis across repeated runs.
- Tunes triggering by rewriting the description, the field Claude reads to decide whether to load a skill.
New to skills? Read our Claude Code skills guide first.
Install
From Anthropic’s official plugin marketplace, inside Claude Code:
/plugin install skill-creator@claude-plugins-official
Or from the anthropics/skills marketplace, where it ships in the example-skills bundle:
/plugin marketplace add anthropics/skills
/plugin install example-skills@anthropic-agent-skills
You can also copy the skills/skill-creator folder into ~/.claude/skills/. On claude.ai, Anthropic’s example skills are available on paid plans.
Example usage
Create a skill that writes release notes from merged PRs since the last tag
Improve my deploy skill. It triggers when I only ask about deployment status
Run evals on the api-conventions skill and tell me where it fails
Tips
- Write the description as “what it does + when to use it”, with the key use case first; Claude Code truncates long descriptions in the skill listing.
- Keep
SKILL.mdunder about 500 lines and move reference material to separate files. - Use
disable-model-invocation: truefor skills with side effects, such as deploys.
Source and license
Part of anthropics/skills, licensed Apache-2.0. Anthropic notes these skills are provided for demonstration and educational purposes, so test before relying on them for critical work. Related: mcp-builder, plugins guide.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need skill-creator to write a skill?
No. A skill is just a folder with a SKILL.md file. skill-creator speeds up the process and adds testing, which matters once a skill grows or must trigger reliably.
What are skill evals?
Test prompts that check whether a skill triggers when it should and produces the right output. skill-creator can run them and compare results across versions.
Where should I save the skills it creates?
Personal skills go in ~/.claude/skills/, project skills in .claude/skills/ inside the repo so your team gets them, or inside a plugin to distribute them.